House of Flame and Shadow (Crescent City, #3)

Sathia gaped at Bryce. But Bryce threw the Fae female a warning look. Bryce had only seen Sathia Flynn from a distance at parties. Usually, the female’s hair was dyed varying shades of shining dark brown or blond. Now her locks were an ordinary light brown—her natural color, perhaps. It was like seeing a glimpse of the real female beneath.

“I cannot allow that,” Morven said. “She is an unwed female.”

“Her brother is here,” Bryce said, nodding to Flynn. “Irresponsible party boy that he is, at least he has the parts that matter to you.”

Flynn glared, but Dec elbowed him hard enough that he stepped up and said, “I’ll, uh, take responsibility for Sathia.”

Sathia bristled like an angry cat, but kept her mouth shut.

“No,” Morven said, a shadow wrapping itself around his wrist like a bracelet. An idle, bored bit of magic. “You are an unsuitable chaperone, as you have demonstrated time and again.”

Hunt gave Bryce a look, and she knew what he was thinking. It was the same thing Ruhn said into her mind a heartbeat later:

As much as it kills me to say this … we might have to let this go. Sathia is Flynn’s sister and all, but it’s not our battle to fight.

Bryce subtly shook her head. You really want to leave her to Morven’s mercy?

Trust me, Bryce, Sathia can handle herself.

But Bryce glanced back at Lidia, who’d been watching all this with a cold, clear focus. Staying completely silent in that way of hers that made others forget her presence. Even Morven, it seemed, hadn’t noticed who stood in his throne room—because he now let out a low grunt of surprise at the sight of her.

Yet the Hind met Bryce’s gaze. What would you do? Bryce tried to convey.

Lidia seemed to grasp the general direction of her thoughts, because she said quietly, “I never had anyone to fight for me.”

Well, that did it.

Bryce opened her mouth, rallying power to her star, but Tharion spoke from behind them.

“I’ll marry Sathia.”



* * *



It took Hypaxia seven hours, seven minutes, and seven seconds to raise Sigrid.

Ithan barely moved from his stool the entire time Hypaxia stood over the corpse and chanted. Jesiba left, came back with her laptop, and worked for some of the time. She even offered Ithan some food, which he refused.

He had no appetite. If this didn’t work …

Hypaxia’s now-hoarse chanting stopped suddenly. “I—”

Ithan hadn’t been able to watch as she’d sewed Sigrid’s head back on. Only when she’d covered the body again had he returned his gaze to the spectacle.

Hypaxia staggered back from the examination table. From the shape under the sheet. Ithan was instantly up, catching her smoothly.

“What have you done?” Jesiba demanded, laptop shutting with a click.

Ithan set Hypaxia on her feet, and the former witch-queen looked between them, helpless and—terrified. Out of the corner of his eye, something white shifted.

Ithan turned as the body on the table sat up. As the sheet rippled away, revealing Sigrid’s grayish face, her eyes closed. The thick, unforgiving stitches in an uneven line along her neck. She still wore her clothes, stiff with old blood.

Stitches popping, Sigrid slowly turned her head.

But her chest … it didn’t rise and fall. She wasn’t breathing.

The lost Fendyr heir opened her eyes. They burned an acid green.

“Reaper,” Jesiba breathed.





49


“I’m telling you, Ketos, she is the worst,” Flynn growled at Tharion in the shadows of the pillars flanking one side of the throne room. Normal shadows, thankfully. Not the awful ones the Fae King commanded. “This is a terrible idea. It will ruin your life.”

“My life is already ruined,” Tharion said, voice as hollow as he felt. “If we live through this, we can get a divorce.”

“The Fae don’t divorce.” Flynn gripped his arm hard. “It’s literally marriage until death.”

“Well, I’m not Fae—”

“She is. If you divorce her, she won’t have any chance of ever marrying again. She’ll be sullied goods. After the first marriage, the only ways out are death or widowhood. A widow can remarry, but a divorcée … it’s not even a thing. She’d be persona non grata.”

On the opposite side of the room, Declan and Ruhn were talking to Sathia in hushed tones. Likely having the same conversation.

Morven glowered away on his throne, shadows like a hissing nest of asps around him, the monstrous twins now flanking him on either side. Tharion had detected the oily shadows creeping toward his mind the moment the twins had arrived. He’d instinctively thrown up a roaring river of water, creating a mental moat around himself. He had no idea what he was doing, but it had worked. The shadows had drowned.

It only made this decision easier. To have anyone forced to endure the Murder Twins’ presence, to marry someone who could pry into minds—

Tharion now said to Flynn, “Your sister would be a pariah amongst the Fae only. Normal people won’t have a problem with divorce.”

Flynn didn’t back down one inch, his teeth flashing. “She is the daughter of Lord Hawthorne. She’s always going to want to marry within the Fae.”

“She accepted my offer.” With the quietest and blandest yes he’d ever heard, but still. A clear acceptance.

Flynn snapped, “Because she’s desperate and scared—you think that’s a good state of mind to make an informed decision?”

Tharion held the male’s stare. “I don’t see anyone else stepping forward to help her.”

Flynn growled. “Look, she’s spoiled and petty and mean as a snake, but she’s my little sister.”

“So find some alternative that doesn’t involve her death to get her out of this.”

Flynn glared, and Tharion glared right back.

Across the way, Sathia shoved past Dec and Ruhn and stormed toward them. She was short—but stood with a presence that commanded the room. Her dark eyes were pure fire as they met Tharion’s. “Are we doing this?”

Gone was that quiet, bland tone.

Bryce, Athalar, and Baxian were watching from the rear of the room, the Hind a few steps to the side.

None of them had expected the day to go this way. Starting with Tharion bailing on the Ocean Queen, and culminating in this shitshow. But if it had been Lesia in Sathia’s stead … he would have wanted someone to step up to help her, faithless soldier or no.

So Tharion said to Sathia, “Yeah. Let’s do it.”

Morven wasted no time in summoning a Priestess of Cthona. Like the bastard was trying to call Tharion’s bluff.

Not five minutes later, Tharion found himself with a wife.



* * *



“You,” Sigrid growled at Ithan, her rasping voice barely more than a whisper.

Ithan could hardly process what he was hearing—seeing.

“What happened?” Jesiba shouted at Hypaxia, who was still clinging to Ithan—who, in turn, was backing them toward the door.

But it was Sigrid who answered, more stitches popping as her neck moved, revealing a brutal scar now etched there. “We came to a doorway. She wanted to go one way …” A smile twisted her face. “I went the other.”

Hypaxia shook her head, frantic. “She wouldn’t come, she slipped through my fingers—”

“I had no interest in letting such a prize go,” intoned a cold voice.

Even Jesiba got to her feet as the Under-King appeared in the morgue doorway.

As he had on the night of the Autumnal Equinox, he wore dark, fraying robes that floated on a phantom breeze.

“You had no right,” Hypaxia challenged, pushing past Ithan as his every sense went into overdrive at the Under-King’s unearthly presence, his ageless might. “No right to turn her—”

“Am I not lord of the dead?” He remained in the doorway, hovering as if standing on air. “She had no Sailing. Her soul was there for the claiming. You offered her one option, witch. I gave her another.”

He beckoned to Sigrid, who moved off the table as if she were alive. As if she had never been dead. Were it not for the acid-green eyes, the scars, Ithan might have believed it.

A Fendyr was a Reaper. A half-life, a walking corpse—

It was sacrilege. A disgrace.

And it was all his fault.

“Which is the more attractive choice?” the Under-King mused as Sigrid took his hand. “To have been raised by you, Hypaxia, to be under your command and thrall … or to be free?”